The article discusses the spread of agriculture to an unprecedented degree in the period from c. A.D. 500 to 1300 (early medieval times) on the basis of both epigraphic and textual materials that also speak of considerable diversity of crops, including what may be considered as cash crops. The author pays attention to the role of metal—especially iron—technology in the development of agriculture during this period. It also argues for betterment in manuring. Inseparably associated with the expansion of agriculture—as an impact of the issuance of profuse number of land grants—are better irrigation technologies. The diversity of irrigation tech-niques and hydraulic projects, local and supra local, had intimate linkages with the variability of access to precious water resources in disparate areas of the subcontinent. In this connection, the article also offers early Indian perceptions of the monsoons; it also seeks to underline the meteor-ologists’ observations of the correlation between the flood-level in the Nile catchment area (by the use of the Nilometer) and the pattern of rainfall in the subcontinent on a long chronological range.

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This essay brings into focus a relatively neglected aspect of economic life in early medieval Bengal. Like many other parts of India, Bengal during ancient and early medieval times did not have any indigenous, good quality war horses. The emergence of Bengal as a regional political entity to reckon with during the early medieval times (c. AD 600 - 1300) must have increased the demand for war horses. The paper analyses the epigraphic accounts of the procurement of these indispensable war animals from northern and northwestern India by the rulers of early medieval Bengal. The Tabaqat-i-Nasiri of the thirteenth century gives an indication of the availablity of northeastern horses - probably Tibetan ones - in Bengal. Chinese accounts of the fifteenth century and some Arabic accounts of the invasions of the Deccan by the Delhi Sultante have been utilised here to suggest that early medieval Bengal not only received regular supplies of imported horses, but also witnessed the transportation of some of these war machines to the Deccan and China.